Don't look back: Life after the Ipswich serial killings

In the winter of 2006, five prostitutes were murdered in Ipswich. The killer was caught, and the red light district is now a quiet residential area. So what became of the other women who once worked its streets?

Former sex worker Sarah Grimwood: 'Everyone was scared. I was praying that cars would come and pick me up, and praying they wouldn't.' Photograph: David Levene David Levene/David Levene

Tracey Russell is embracing new motherhood, happily signing up to baby massage and yoga classes in the seaside town of Felixstowe, Suffolk. Connor Joseph is 10 weeks old and has just nodded off in her arms, blissfully unaware of the journey his mother made to get here.

Three and a half years ago, Russell's world was a darker place. With a heroin habit to feed, she spent her nights selling sex to strangers and her days sleeping in doorways, squats and, at one point, a public toilet. Russell, 34, recalls the night she decided to quit: "After Annette died, I thought, I can't go on doing this, it's too dangerous. I'd get into cars with punters and they'd be fidgeting and I'd be thinking, 'Is that a knife?' Or, 'This person could be the killer.' I stood on the corner and thought, 'What am I doing? I've lost too much.' One night, I was freezing and wet, and a car pulled up – it was drug workers. They said they could help me immediately, and that was that."

Russell, who was a close friend of Nicholls, was one of the women who survived the experience. She came off the streets and never looked back. Originally from Chester, she left the city when she was 15 because her mum's boyfriend was a "weirdo" and she had never got on with her dad. She came to Ipswich in 2002 with a boyfriend, Steve, to get off heroin, but a year later ended up on the streets when he was sent to prison. Steve died of an overdose in 2006, as did one of her five brothers; three of her other brothers are still users.

For Russell, addiction was an easy path. "When you take drugs," she says, "you forget everything. It lasts for six hours, then you need more. It's OK for a couple of days and then, when you stop, it's horrible. You do stupid things to get it that you'd never do [otherwise]. At the end, you'd do anything to get a hold of it – lie, cheat, steal. But then, after a few years, you take it because you have to, to keep away the aches and pains, the emotions and the remembering. The worse thing for me, when I was on methadone [a heroin substitute], was I started remembering about my kids."

Connor is Russell's fifth child. One was stillborn, the other three, all girls, were adopted. She can't quite believe she has been allowed to keep him. "I thought they'd be a bit funny because I used to be on drugs. But the social workers don't come round any more."

To get clean, Russell started from scratch. She moved out of Ipswich, chucked out her telephone sim card and learned some self-control. "I do miss the laughs that I had with Annette," she says, "but now, instead of thinking, 'Oh God, I've got to go and score', I think, 'God, I've got to make Connor a bottle.' It makes me happy, getting up in the morning, doing my housework. I can go out with my friends, without being embarrassed because I have to score drugs. It is a pity that so many people had to die to make the change."

In February 2008, Steve Wright was convicted of the Suffolk murders. Meanwhile, local police, councils and drugs charities had joined forces to get the town's sex workers off drugs and off the streets. It worked – Ipswich's former red light district is a now a quiet residential area and there are no longer any street prostitutes.

Sarah Grimwood, 29, from Ipswich, walked the same streets and shared the same punters as Russell. She, too, is now off heroin.

"What was I like when I first came here?" she says to Brian Tobin, director of Iceni, the drugs charity that helped Grimwood get clean. "I had no teeth, battered-up legs from the needles – I thought they'd have to chop my legs off! They were dark times – I did it for 11 years."

Grimwood's eyes are rimmed with kohl and she jiggles constantly as she speaks. "I don't know my dad," she says. "I'm an only child. My mum had me at 16. I didn't finish school and I was a little chubby – I never felt like I fitted in anywhere. At 13, I started hanging around town drinking with people and smoking spliff."

She began taking speed and ecstasy, and then, after moving in with a boyfriend at 17, methadone. He was the "loveliest person you could meet", but crack changed him. "I thought if I touched the heavy drugs I'd die, but when I crossed that line, I felt a calmness, a gouching [relaxing]."

Grimwood worked at a massage parlour to fund her habit, but lost her job and was introduced to the streets by her boyfriend's sister. "My boyfriend hated his sister working; he hated me working even more. But I hate feeling like someone is paying for me. I wanted to try to get us money, so he didn't go out burgling. I started saving £20 here and there, so that if it was a bad night or it was snowing, I wouldn't have to go out. But when he was on crack he would steal from me."

After six and a half years together, her boyfriend and his sister went into rehab and moved on, leaving Grimwood "alone and bitter". She moved back home, but carried on working for three years. "I lived like a vampire, never seeing the daylight. I dreaded waking up. If I woke at 4am or 5am, I'd be begging myself to go back to sleep and that I had just a little bit of gear to get me through. I would borrow £20 from my nan. Then I'd go out on the streets and get back the money I'd borrowed."

Her lowest point came when her mother ended up in hospital following a scare when a needle in Grimwood's handbag went into her finger. Remembering, Grimwood's eyes brim with tears and she gulps. "Scummy… I really let her down. She tried to get me off drugs, but we couldn't really speak to one another. I can't tell her the whole truth even now. I've got liver problems because I've got hep[atitis] C and I don't know how that's going to go."

For sex workers, fear of being attacked comes with the territory, and by December 2006 Grimwood had had a few close calls – one narrow escape had left her bruised, terrified and lying in a ditch. But the fear of a serial killer was something else. "Everyone was scared," she says. "I tried to block it all out by taking more drugs. I was praying that the cars would come and pick me up, and I was praying that they wouldn't."

The murders were the "wake-up call" she needed, Grimwood says. In rehab now, she has been off hard drugs for two years, though she still uses prescription drugs methadone and Valium. She has finished an art course and took part in a stage drama with the Red Rose Chain, an Ipswich-based independent film and theatre company. She wants to "get off everything" so that she can eventually go to college to study drugs work. "I used to need support morning to night," she says, "but not so much now. I see my mum for Sunday dinner, and I see my mum and my nan for bingo on a Monday."

She just wishes she'd had help sooner. "People thought we were no-hopers, that we didn't want to change. But I always wanted a way out. It makes me sad to think that five girls had to die. Those girls really wanted and needed that help."

Jacci, 37, who does not want to reveal her surname, is from Sunderland and moved to Ipswich in April 2002, partly to be close to her dad, who had left home when she was two and reappeared when she was pregnant with her third child. The other reason, ironically, was to get off heroin.

Four months later, her habit was worse than ever. On 23 August that year, her three children were taken into care: the eldest two were put with the same foster family and the youngest, a baby girl, was adopted. Jacci, who had been abused as a child, remembers taking to the streets feeling that she had nothing left to lose. Most of the time she was homeless, sleeping in drug dens or with whoever offered her a floor. One older woman, "Scottish Elaine", had a filthy flat and would let people sleep there if they bought her drink or "a crack pipe", Jacci says. "There were eight of us [living] there," she says. "I'd sleep on the floor, a chair, whatever. I didn't have any stuff, there was nowhere to wash. You didn't give a damn."

In 2006, she was living just off the Ipswich red light district, or "the beat", where the serial killer struck, but it was 2008 before she finally agreed to go into rehab. "I came round once after four days. I didn't know where I'd been or what I'd done, and I just thought, 'Enough is enough – I can't live like this.' I knew the day I went into rehab, that was it. That life was over. I wanted to see my grandkids."

Jacci has been clean for 16 months and lives in a flat with two friends. She now sees her two boys, who are 20 and 16, and she plays in a heavy metal band. "My life has turned around amazingly. I went to the theatre the other night, to see Joseph. I go to church, too. I stopped being a victim. You can't change what's happened to you, but you can change the way you feel about it."

•Five Daughtersstarts tomorrow on BBC1 at 9pm, and continues on Monday and Tuesday.